By Rose Levenson
As I walked onto Bar-Ilan’s idyllic campus in Ramat-Gan a few weeks ago, I was thinking about the future because we were scheduled to talk with Dr. David Passig. Dr. Passig specializes in futures studies. Yes, futures, not future studies. As a rising senior in college, it is that time when I need to start making decisions about next steps. I often think about my personal future, but what about the future of the world and how that will impact me and my children?
Dr. Passig threw some staggering statistics at us. Did you know that there are currently more men than women living on Earth for the first time in recorded history? In another light, in 1948 there were 600,000 Jews in Israel. In 2014 there were approximately 6.5 million Jews in Israel, and in 2050 there are projected to be 15 million Jews in Israel with a global total of about 18 million Jews total. These numbers have dramatic consequences for the future of North American Jewry.
As potential leaders of the future of North American Jewry, we need to be able to use Passig’s work to help inform our decision-making as we go forward. Passig made it clear that we should not take him on face value, but that we should look deeply into the reasoning and mathematics of his research. These predictions are not based in brainstorming (predictive reliability of around 7%) or linear extrapolation (predictive reliability of around 30%). Instead, his method is an offshoot of systems theories studies which provide a much more reliable and valid measuring stick. As I go forward in making decisions for my own life, community, or perhaps something even bigger, I will keep Dr. Passig’s advice in my mind: there is logic within systems, nothing is random. We must use what we know to help us, not to hurt us.
